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Our initial response to questions have to be prefaced with the fact that we know nothing about the site and the factors contributing to your conditions… so we reserve the right to change our opinions! lol

Question:

I’ve had this site for a while as a client, but recently I’ve been noticing that the home page is competing with one of my primary landing pages for placement. This isn’t exactly the classic keyword cannibalization case however because I can’t use a canonical to point the homepage over to the landing page.

What’s also weird is that Google is now rewriting the title of the homepage to rank for the keywords that I’ve been targeting with the landing page. Now they are both stuck on page two and traffic has gone in the toilet as a result.

I’ve thought about using a canonical from the landing page to the homepage to give Google what it wants since it seems to really like the homepage. Or perhaps the homepage is better received by actual users and Google is trying to tell me my landing page sucks.

I’ve taken all of the blog posts in the landing page category and used canonicals to tell Google to prioritize the landing page so this would create kind of a daisy chain from the posts back to the homepage if I were to introduce the landing page canonical. This just seems like a recipe for disaster to me though.

The other thought I had was to completely de-optimize my homepage as much as possible. Right now I have a contextual link for the broadest possible keyword leading back to the landing page so another idea would be to use exact match here ie the title that Google rewrote and link with that anchor to the landing page.

So I’ve got a few ideas for what might work, but thought it would make sense to run them by an onpage expert first. At the very least this should be an interesting discussion!

Answer:

This is called link flow imbalance and you can correct it by using the old site:mydomain.com keyword in Google (to see which pages are most relevant to their algorithm for said keyword) then linking to the target page (using the contextual keyword 30-40% exact, then 60% with other modifiers and synonyms) as anchor text via internal links to the target page to correct this vs. using a canonical.

Google manipulating Meta Data will also be corrected once you correct the link flow for said pages. Make sense?